Forgery, in art, a work of literature, painting, sculpture, or objet d’art that purports to be the work of someone other than its true maker. The range of forgeries extends from misrepresentation of a genuine work of art to the outright counterfeiting of a work or style of an artist. Forgery must be distinguished from copies produced with no intent to deceive.

The most common type of fraudulence in art is forgery—making a work or offering one for sale with the intent to defraud, usually by falsely attributing it to an artist whose works command high prices. Other fraudulent practices include plagiarism, the false presentation of another’s work as one’s own, and piracy, the unauthorized use of someone else’s work, such as the publication of a book without permission of the author; both practices are generally in violation of copyright laws.

Forgery most often occurs with works of painting, sculpture, decorative art, and literature; less often with music. Plagiarism is more difficult to prove as fraud, since the possibility of coincidence must be weighed against evidence of stealing. Piracy is more often a business than an artistic fraud; it frequently occurs in the publication of editions of foreign books in countries that have no copyright agreement with the nation in which the work was copyrighted. A stage production, the reproduction of a painting, the performance of a musical composition, and analogous practices of other kinds of works without authorization and royalty payments also fall into this category.

The fundamental consideration in determining forgery is “intent to deceive.” The act of copying a painting or other work of art is in itself not forgery, nor is the creation of a work “in the style” of a recognized painter, composer, or writer or of a particular historical period. Forgery may be the act not of the creator himself but of the dealer who adds a fraudulent signature or in some way alters the appearance of a painting or manuscript. Restoration of a damaged painting or manuscript, however, is not considered forgery even if the restorer in his work creates a significant part of the total work. Misattributions may result either from honest errors in scholarship—as in the attribution of a work to a well-known artist when the work was in fact done by a painter in his workshop, a pupil, or a later follower—or from a deliberate fraud.

Excluded from the category of literary forgeries is the copy made in good faith for purposes of study. In the matter of autographs, manuscripts in the handwriting of their authors, forgeries must be distinguished from facsimiles, copies made by lithography or other reproductive processes. Some early editions of Lord Byron’s work, for example, contained a facsimile of an autograph letter of the poet. If such facsimiles are detached from the volumes that they were intended to illustrate, they may deceive the unwary.

The commonest motivation for fraudulence is monetary gain. Fraudulence is most likely to occur when the demand for a certain kind of work coincides with scarcity and thus raises the market prices. Unprincipled dealers have encouraged technically skilled artists to create forgeries, occasionally guiding them to supply the precise demands of collectors or museums. This is by no means a modern phenomenon: in the 1st and 2nd centuries ad, sculptors working in Rome made replicas of Grecian works to satisfy the demands for the greatly admired Grecian sculpture of the preceding five centuries. These copies or adaptations apparently were not offered as contemporary work but as booty from Greece at the extraordinarily high prices paid for such works in imperial Rome. Similar circumstances may account for the “discovery” of a manuscript or autograph by a dead author or composer, although many such finds are quite legitimate and have been authenticated.

The history of the arts reveals instances of persons who have used forgery either to gain recognition of their own craftsmanship or to enjoy deceiving the critics who had rejected their genuine work. A legend told about Michelangelo illustrates this point. At the age of 21, he carved in marble a small sleeping Eros, or Cupid, based on ancient Roman works that he admired. Some time later this carving was sold as an antique to the well-known collector Cardinal Riario, who prized it highly. When Michelangelo stepped forward and claimed the work as his own he won immediate fame as a young man who could rival the work of the greatly venerated ancient sculptors.

Two further motivations behind forgery must be noted: forged documents have been produced from time to time to exalt or malign some religion, political party, or race; and forgeries are sometimes created as a hoax. Some hoaxes are intended to confound or ridicule the experts; others are intended to parody or burlesque an artist or genre.

There are basically three methods of producing a forgery: by an exact copy, by a composite of parts, and by a work done in the style of an artist or period and given a deliberately false attribution. These methods apply most directly to the visual arts but can be discerned in literature and music as well.

Literary forgery

Financial gain is the most common motive for literary forgery, the one responsible for the numerous forged autographs that appear on the market. The popularity of such authors as the Romantic poets Robert Burns, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byron led to the fabrication of numerous forgeries of their autographs, some of which remain in circulation. These forgeries were usually made by men who had access to only one or two genuine specimens, which they began by tracing. Their forgeries are stiff, exaggeratedly uniform, and lacking in the fluency and spontaneity of genuine autographs.

A look at a letter supposedly written by William Shakespeare to his wife, Anne Hathaway; it was, in …

Instances of literary forgery

Occasionally a forger appears with a certain specious glamour like Constantine Simonides (1824–67), a Greek adventurer who varied his trade in perfectly genuine manuscripts with the sale of strange concoctions of his own. Maj. George de Luna Byron, alias de Gibler, who claimed to be a natural son of Byron by a Spanish countess, successfully produced and disposed of large quantities of forgeries ascribed to his alleged father and to Shelley, John Keats, and others. More commonplace is the forgery encountered in the case of the Edinburgh forger A.H. (“Antique”) Smith, who was responsible for forgeries of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Stuart, and other persons from Scottish literature and history—a feat that ultimately earned him 12 months’ imprisonment.

Particularly notorious was the case of the Wise forgeries. Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) had the reputation of being one of the most distinguished private book collectors on either side of the Atlantic, and his Ashley Library in London became a place of pilgrimage for scholars from Europe and the United States. He constantly exposed piracies and forgeries and always denied that he was a dealer. The shock was accordingly the greater in 1934 when John W. Carter and Henry Graham Pollard published An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, proving that about 40 or 50 of these, commanding high prices, were forgeries, and that all could be traced to Wise. Subsequent research confirmed the finding of Carter and Pollard and indicted Wise for other and more serious offenses, including the sophistication of many of his own copies of early printed books with leaves stolen from copies in the British Museum.

No forgery to attain recognition is better known than the “Thomas Rowley” poems of Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), which the youthful author attempted to pass off as the work of a medieval cleric. These poems, which caused a scholarly feud for many years, were influential in the Gothic revival. Chatterton, however, enjoys a place in English letters as a creative genius in his own right. The more conventional forger William Henry Ireland (1777–1835) cheerfully manufactured Shakespearean documents until his forged “lost” tragedy Vortigern and Rowena was laughed off the stage at the Drury Lane Theatre, London, in 1796. More fortunate was Charles Bertram, who produced an account of Roman Britain by “Richard of Westminster,” an imaginary monk. Bertram’s dupe, the eccentric antiquary Dr. William Stukeley, identified the monk with the chronicler Richard of Cirencester, known to have resided at Westminster in the 14th century. Bertram’s forgery (cunningly published in a volume containing the works of two genuine ancient authors, Gildas and Nennius) had an enormous influence upon historians of Roman Britain, lasting into the 20th century. Equally influential were the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson (1736–96), which influenced the early period of the Romantic movement. To what degree Macpherson’s poems are to be regarded as spurious is not certain. Denounced in his own day they were possibly, as he claimed, based upon a genuine oral tradition of Scottish Gaelic poetry; but there can be little doubt that they were carefully edited and interpolated by their collector.

Among the forgers who have tried to make the experts look foolish is George Psalmanazar (1679?–1763). A Frenchman, he went to England where he pretended, with great success, to be a native of Formosa (Taiwan), and published a book about that island, which he had never visited. Another is William Lauder, who attempted to prove John Milton guilty of plagiarism by quoting 17th-century poets who wrote in Latin, into whose works he had interpolated Latin translations from Paradise Lost. A forgery made as a joke but taken seriously was the “Ern Malley” poems, offered to an Australian magazine in 1944 as the work of a recently dead poet. Actually it was composed by two young soldiers who wished to ridicule certain aspects of contemporary poetry.

The pure fabrication is a kind of forgery that defies classification, often because there is no false attribution and the motives are difficult to ascertain. An example of this is the Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38) of Geoffrey of Monmouth (died 1155), a pseudo-historian who compounded stories from Celtic mythology and classical and biblical sources into a fictitious history of ancient Britain. The book became one of the most popular of the Middle Ages and was the basis for some Arthurian legends recounted in medieval romance and epic.

A tale of literary forgery that came to light in the early 21st century was that of the celebrity biographer Lee Israel, who confessed in her memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2008), that while down on her luck in the 1990s she had forged and sold to collectors hundreds of letters by various notable figures—Louise Brooks, Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker, Humphrey Bogart, and Lillian Hellman among them.

Detection of literary forgeries

The scientific examination of a forged document may demonstrate its spurious character by showing that the parchment, paper, or ink cannot belong to the period to which they pretend. A skillful forger takes care, however, to secure appropriate materials; and in any case, scientific examination will not avail against the contemporary forger, living in the same age as his victim. Accordingly, other tests must be employed.

Forgeries may be detected by the methods of examination formulated by Jean Mabillon, in his great work De re diplomatica (1681), for determining the authenticity of a document by the writing and the style of the terminology. These techniques have developed during three centuries into the modern sciences of paleography and diplomatics, by which various scripts and formulas can be assigned to particular ages and localities, and effective comparison can be made between two examples of handwriting purporting to come from the same pen. Thus it is possible to state that a particular document could not have been written at the date that it bears. In dealing with printed texts, analogous methods are employed.

Nevertheless, a forgery may pretend to be no more than a copy of a genuine original. It then becomes necessary to examine the language and style in which it is written and to look for anachronisms or for statements that conflict with known authorities. This is the method of textual criticism brilliantly employed by Richard Bentley in his Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1699), which proved that these letters, far from being written by Phalaris (a Sicilian tyrant of the 6th century bc), were in fact the work of a Greek sophist of the 2nd century ad.

While the detection of the careful forger may require an expert, forged literary autographs can often be detected by anyone taking the trouble to compare them with an authentic example. Many collectors have been deceived by their own credulity, because they wished to believe that they were getting a good bargain and subconsciously suppressed their critical faculty. A classic case is that of the French forger Vrain-Denis Lucas, who sold a collection of forgeries including a letter of St. Mary Magdalene, written in French on paper made in France.

Forgery in the visual arts

Any art object—paintings, sculpture, jewelry, ceramics, fine furniture, and decorative pieces of all kinds—can be forged. The difficulty of forging, however, is as important as market price in determining what is forged. Probably fewer than 1 percent of stone sculptures are false because they require so much labour to make and their market is limited, but as many as 10 percent of modern French paintings on the market may be forgeries. The technical difficulties in making a convincing imitation of an ancient Greek vase are so great that forgeries are almost nonexistent. In contrast the forgery level of tiny archaic Greek and Cretan bronze statuettes, which are simple to cast, is possibly as high as 50 percent. A forger is most likely to succeed with a mediocre piece in the middle price range because such a piece probably will never be subjected to definitive examination. Although the price should be low enough to allay suspicion, the object can still yield a fair return for the effort expended by the forger.

The copy is the easiest forgery to make and is usually the easiest to detect. When a duplicate has appeared the problem is merely to determine which is the original and which is the copy. At least a dozen excellent replicas of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa exist, many of them by his students. Various owners of these copies have at various times claimed that they possess the original. The Louvre is satisfied that it owns the painting by Leonardo because close examination reveals slight changes in the composition underneath the outermost layer of paint, and because this painting has an unbroken record of ownership from the time that the artist painted it.

A monumental sculptural forgery was a copy based on a Greek bronze statuette of a warrior of 470 bc, only five inches high and located in the Antikenabteilung, Berlin. The forgers made an eight-foot-high reproduction of it in terra-cotta and offered it as an Etruscan masterpiece. The resemblance was noted by the experts, who thought it to be an example of an Etruscan artist borrowing a Greek design motif. In 1961, after it had been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 40 years, an analysis was made of the black glaze that covered the figure. It was found that the glaze contained as a colouring agent manganese, which never was used for this purpose in ancient times. Finally, Alfredo Adolfo Fioravanti confessed that he was the sole survivor of the three forgers.

Fine examples of pottery and porcelain have always commanded high prices, which have, in turn, encouraged the making of forgeries and reproductions. Since many European factories tried to imitate Italian majolica during the 19th century when it was especially popular, forgeries are common. The work of Urbino, Castel Durante, Faenza, and Gubbio was copied freely, and, to a lesser extent, so were the wares of Orvieto and Florence. Most of these forgeries are not close enough to deceive a reasonably expert eye. Potters used natural deposits the impurities of which, for good or ill, often affected the final result; until recently it has been impossible to procure materials in a pure state. In all but a few isolated instances (some German stoneware reproductions, for example) the forger no longer has access to these original deposits and he has to imitate the effect of the impurities as best he can. Although the best forgeries are often remarkably close to the originals, they are not very numerous.

In the composite fraud, or pastiche, the forger combines copies of various parts of another artist’s work to form a new composition and adds a few connecting elements of his own to make it a convincing presentation. This type of forgery is more difficult to detect than the copy. Such a combining of various elements from different pieces can be very deceptive, because a creative artist often borrows from his own work. In fact, the similarity of a figure or an object in a forgery to that in a well-known work of art often adds to the believability of the new creation.

The Dutch forger Han van Meegeren employed a combined composite and stylistic procedure when he created seven paintings between 1936 and 1942 based on the work of Johannes Vermeer. In The Supper at Emmaus he combined figures, heads, hands, plates, and a wine jar from various early genuine Vermeers; it was hailed as a masterpiece and the earliest known Vermeer. Ironically, van Meegeren never was detected as a forger. At the end of World War II he was arrested for having sold a painting attributed to Vermeer to one of the enemy and was accused of being a collaborator. He chose to reveal himself as a forger, which was a lesser offense, and proved his confession by painting another “Vermeer” under the eye of the authorities.

A notable forger of the late 20th century was Shaun Greenhalgh, who created several works of art in a variety of styles and, after carefully constructing a credible provenance for each, sold them over the course of roughly two decades with the help of his parents, George and Olive Greenhalgh. One of his notable forgeries was a stoneware sculpture, The Faun, thought to be a rare unglazed ceramic sculpture by Paul Gauguin, another was the Amarna Princess believed to date from 1350 bc.

A variation in composite forgery, quite common with inlaid French furniture, involves the use of parts from damaged but genuine pieces to create a single complete piece that may or may not resemble one of the pieces from which it has been made. These made-up pieces are still considered forgeries. In composites of archaeological material only one part may be ancient, the balance being made up to complete the object. The head of a small terra-cotta figure may be ancient, the body and limbs of modern workmanship. A single ancient element in a composite forgery will help to deceive the buyer.

Most difficult of all to detect is the forgery done in the style of a particular artist or age. If the forger is skillful and is able to absorb the attitudes, conventions, and techniques of the period, he can often create a very successful piece of duplicity.

The work of the Italian Alceo Dossena belongs in this class. He very competently forged works that were acquired by collectors and museums throughout the world. From 1916 to 1928 he produced hundreds of forgeries created as original expressions of archaic Greek, medieval, and Renaissance sculptors.

A newly discovered type of art inevitably brings on a flood of forgeries. At the end of the 19th century, when the first small, attractive Tanagra figurines were found in Greece, the market very shortly was flooded with a myriad of fraudulent Tanagra terra-cotta statuettes. In the mid-20th century, African primitive art became very popular, and woodcarvers from Italy to Scandinavia responded to supply the demand. Later, a very early civilization was discovered in Turkey, and the few genuine Anatolian ceramic pieces that appeared on the market were followed immediately by very competent forgeries apparently made in the same location as the ancient pieces. The lack of knowledge about genuine pieces made detection extremely difficult.

Detection of forgeries in the visual arts

The key to detecting forgery of unique objects lies in the fact that every object has within itself evidence of the time and the place in which it was made. The two main approaches, stylistic and technical analysis, are complementary and are best used together.

Stylistic analysis is subjective: it rests on the astute eye of the art historian. Each artist has a style, a flair, a verve unique to himself, and this can be recognized. His style will undergo change throughout his career, and this, too, can be stylistically analyzed and documented from his known works. When an unknown work purporting to be by a certain artist is discovered, the art historian attempts to fit it into the overall body of works by this artist. The subject matter, the brushwork, the choice of colours, and the type of composition are all consistent elements in a given artist’s production. Any variation immediately arouses suspicion. When the idiosyncrasies of an artist’s brushwork are studied, a fraud can sometimes be detected in much the same way a handwriting forgery is proven. In ancient works, particularly in antiquities, the scholar must examine the iconography of a piece. Forgers rarely have the scholarly background to combine iconographic elements correctly, and their errors often betray them.

An object must also be studied for its purpose. Ancient works were made for functional purposes. A forger usually makes an attractive piece often inconsistent with that purpose. As they were used most ancient pieces developed signs of wear. These rubbed and worn areas should appear in logical places on the object.

Documentation is also an important area of investigation. The apparent authenticity of many spurious pieces is bolstered by false documents to attest to the point of origin, former owners, and expert opinions concerning the pieces. A careful examination of these records often detects the forgery.

The hardest deception to detect is usually one that has been made recently. The forgery is a product of the time in which it was made, and the forger is closer to current understanding of the artist or period forged. The forgery, therefore, is often more appealing than a genuine work of art. As a forgery ages, viewpoints and tastes shift, and there is a new basis of understanding. Consequently, a forgery rarely survives more than a generation.

Technical analysis, an objective approach, rests on an arsenal of equipment and tests. The fundamental principle is the comparison of a suspected work with a genuine work of the same artist or period. The suspected piece must show the same pigments or materials used and comparable age deterioration. Inconsistencies automatically cause the piece to be suspect. Oil paintings dry out and develop a crackle, bronzes oxidize, and ancient glass buried in the ground develops iridescent layers. The microscope is the most useful basic tool: a close examination of the physical condition often will show if the aging is genuine or has been artificially induced. The type of tools used by the artist can be detected from an examination of their telltale traces.

Ultraviolet rays readily reveal additions or alterations to a painting, since the varnish layers and some of the paint layers fluoresce to different colours. Ultraviolet is also used in the examination of marble sculpture. Old marble develops a surface that will fluoresce to a yellow-greenish colour, whereas a modern piece or an old surface recently recut will fluoresce to a bright violet. Infrared rays can penetrate thin paint layers in an oil painting to reveal underpainting that may disclose an earlier painting on the same canvas, or perhaps a signature that has been painted out and covered by a more profitable one. X rays are used to examine the internal structure of an object. A carved wooden Virgin supposedly of the 15th century but revealing modern machine-made nails deep inside is obviously a fraud. A forger usually works for the surface effect and is not concerned with the internal structures.

Sometimes it is necessary to remove small bits of materials from a work and subject them to various analyses. Chemical analysis is particularly valuable in determining the pigment used because many of the paints available to the modern forger were unknown in earlier times. Today titanium, a 20th-century product, is used to make the white pigment in most oil paints, whereas white lead was the element used in the time of Rembrandt. Many ancient colours were manufactured by grinding natural minerals such as lapis lazuli for blue and malachite for green. Today cheaper synthetic chemicals are used. Some chemical tests, however, require the removal of more ancient material than is desirable. In that event a speck as small as the head of a pin can be analyzed spectrographically. From the burning of a minute sample a photographic record of the spectrum of the light emitted is analyzed to reveal the elements present and their relative percentages.

The dating of an object by the study of radioactive decay of carbon-14 has had little application in the detection of art forgery because of the large quantities of material that must be destroyed. Thermoluminescent dating is based on the slight damage to all matter, including clays, by the faint nuclear radiation present in the earth. Magnetic dating of ceramic objects is based on the slow but perceptible shift of the earth’s magnetic field over the centuries.

Considerations of aesthetics and risk

One may logically question the real meaning of the difference between a genuine and a spurious work of art when in many cases it requires such expert study to detect the difference between the two. Or to phrase it another way, what is the difference in value of a work of art that has been on view in a museum for 40 years, after it has been proved to be false? This is a somewhat philosophical point in that the object itself has not changed, only our opinion of it. Its monetary value has been reduced from that of a rare, expensive, original piece to that of an attractive but spurious imitation. Its aesthetic quality has become a real danger, as it is a perversion of the truth. The forgery presents a false understanding of the work of an artist or an ancient culture, one which has been perverted in its modern translation. To appreciate the work of ancient artists their work must be studied alone and not be diverted by forgeries, or one will be inexorably misguided.

Despite all the studies and technical tests available, forgeries will still be made. The 20th-century art forger is far better equipped and much more knowledgeable than his predecessor. The demand for rare works of art has increased, and he will attempt to supply them. In collecting, whether by the private collector or by a museum, there comes a point when, after all the studies and all the tests are conducted, a decision has to be made as to whether or not to purchase a piece in question. The element of risk can be minimized but not eliminated. At this point, the collector should be ready to back his opinion with the purchase price. In order to acquire great pieces, particularly from newly discovered and relatively unknown cultures, it is necessary to take a calculated chance. The collector who has never bought a forgery probably has never bought a great piece of art.